AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

Disaster Preparedness Planning requires knowledge of the materials in a collection, their value, and information on the best treatments available. Often, treatments can only mitigate damage done to collections, following a disaster. In some instances, there are few options and treatment only allows for a window of time when the materials can then be digitized, or otherwise documented. The degree of damage, the size of the collection impacted, or the urgency of the disaster may require the use of techniques that otherwise are not typically used within the field. The use of such methods is exceptional and, as such, requires scientific investigation before the treatment needs to be used. This project addresses one such emergency treatment: the use of gamma radiation, and its immediate effects on materials within archive and paper-based collections. A set of surrogate materials was treated with gamma radiation to test how this treatment affects the materials. Colorimetry and attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy were employed to discern if the materials underwent chemical change, and to discern which materials underwent the most change.